Wilderness protection is a growing necessity for modern societies, and this is particularly true for areas where population density is extremely high, for example Europe. Conservation, however, implies very high opportunity costs. It is thus crucial to create incentives for efficient management...

We are concerned with land allocation andinvestment decisions when dealing withpartially degraded areas that might be (1)remediated and returned to a more natural state;or (2) irreversibly developed. This type ofproblem seems particularly relevant in Europewhere the issue of wilderness...

This paper discusses a methodology to assess the performances of tourism management of local governments when economic and environmental aspects are considered as equally relevant. In particular, the focus is on the comparison and efficiency assessment of Italian municipalities located on the...

Despite the growing concern about actual on-going climate change, there is little consensus about the scale and timing of actions needed to stabilise the concentrations of greenhouse gases. Many countries are unwilling to implement effective mitigation strategies, at least in the short-term, and...

We explore a framework that could be used to assign quantitative allocations of emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs), across all countries, one budget period at a time, as envisioned at the December 2011 negotiations in Durban. Under the two-part plan: (i) China, India, and other developing...

A new climate change treaty must address three current gaps: the absence of emissions targets extending far into the future; the absence of participation by the United States, China, and other developing countries; and the absence of reasons to expect compliance. Moreover, to be politically...

Policy makers, as well as many economists, recognize geological carbon capture and storage (CCS) as an option for avoiding costly emission reductions. While an extreme perspective is to envision CCS as a magic bullet to solve the issue of climate change, a more balanced economics perspective...

A central issue in tackling climate change is to understand to what extent different short-term mitigation strategies are consistent with long-term stabilization targets. The present article aims at cross-comparing emission paths derived by plausible short-term policies against those implied by...

How can a decision-maker assess the potential of environmental policies when a group of experts provides divergent estimates on their effectiveness? To address this question, we propose and analyze a variant of the well-studied $\alpha$-maxmin model in decision theory. In our framework, and...